I am a postdoctoral scholar with the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University and that at Princeton University, working with Prof. Andrea Goldsmith and Prof. H. Vincent Poor. I received my Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles in 2011 under the supervision of Prof. Gregory J. Pottie. My research interests include energy system and smart grid, cyber-physical security, sensing, signal processing, communications and control, optimization theory and algorithms, network information theory.

• Real-time outage detection in power transmission and distribution networks,
  In both power transmission and distribution networks, current monitoring systems with infrequent and asynchronous measurements perform inadequately in providing grid situational awareness. While real-time synchronized sensing is enabled by the new technology of Phasor measurement units (PMU), these devices are costly. We developed efficient and low-cost sensing, communications and data processing frameworks that exploit different sensing technologies. We characterized the optimal design tradeoffs between various resource constraints and performance requirements.


• Fundamental limits of cyber-physical security in smart grids,
  Cyber-security in smart grids that concerns measurement data attacks has received much attention lately. Cyber-physical security, for which much less is known, adds another crucial dimension to the problem that concerns control signal attacks which instantly change the physical dynamics of the grid. A fundamental problem on cyber-physical attacks is finding the sparest undetectable attack pattern, as sparsity models the execution complexity of an attack. As this l0 minimization problem is NP hard, heuristics have been proposed without optimality guarantees. For a general class of sensor models, we showed that the sparsest attack that alters the power generation and loads while maintaining undetectable can be found almost surely in polynomial time. Simple geometric characterizations of the sparsest undetectable attacks are obtained.


• Non-convex and large-scale optimization in spectrum management,
  Due to the interference coupling in wireless media, spectrum management problems in wireless networks are in general NP hard non-convex optimization. We provided a complete primal domain characterization of the optimal solutions for the continuous frequency model. We also discovered the weakest coupling condition such that orthogonalization of any pair (among all) of the users satisfying this condition is guaranteed to achieve all Pareto optimal rate tuples. This simple condition enables flexible and distributed spectrum allocation decisions with optimality guarantees.


• Successive decoding capacity in interference channels,
  Information theoretic capacity of interference networks remains open for several decades. Bridging the decoding complexity between information theoretic schemes and spectrum management schemes, we studied the system capacity with the employment of successive decoding. We showed that the successive decoding capacity oscillates between the information theoretic capacity and the capacity with interference treated as noise. Consequently, informed practical choices of communications schemes can be made based on the obtained trade-os between decoding complexities and system performance.

Journal Publications

• Yue Zhao, Andrea Goldsmith, and H. Vincent Poor, "Fundamental limits of cyber-physical security in smart power grids," IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Special Issue on Control of Cyber-Physical Systems, under review. pdf
• Yue Zhao, Chee Wei Tan, A. Salman Avestimehr, Suhas N. Diggavi, and Gregory J. Pottie, "On the maximum achievable sum-rate with successive decoding in interference channels," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 58, No. 6, pp. 3798-3820, Jun. 2012. pdf
• Yue Zhao and Gregory J. Pottie, "Optimal spectrum management in multiuser interference channels," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, to appear. pdf

Conference Publications

• Yue Zhao, Andrea Goldsmith, and H. Vincent Poor, "Fundamental limits of cyber-physical security in smart power grids," submitted to IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2013.
• Jianshu Chen, Yue Zhao, Andrea Goldsmith, and H. Vincent Poor, "Optimal joint detection and estimation in linear models," submitted to IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2013.
• Yue Zhao, Raffi Sevlian, Ram Rajagopal, Andrea Goldsmith, and H. Vincent Poor, "Outage detection in power distribution networks with optimally-deployed power flow sensors," to appear in Proc. of IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, 2013. pdf
• Yue Zhao, Suhas N. Diggavi, Andrea Goldsmith, and H. Vincent Poor, "Convex optimization for precoder design in MIMO interference networks," Proc. of Allerton Conference on Communication, Control and Computing, pp.1213-1219, 1-5 Oct. 2012. pdf
• Yue Zhao, Andrea Goldsmith, and H. Vincent Poor, "On PMU location selection for line outage detection in wide-area transmission networks," Proc. of IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting, pp.1-8, 22-26 July, 2012. pdf
• Yue Zhao, Chee Wei Tan, A. Salman Avestimehr, Suhas N. Diggavi, and Gregory J. Pottie, "On the sum-capacity with successive decoding in interference channels," Proc. of IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), pp. 1494-1498, July 31 - Aug. 5, 2011. pdf
• Yue Zhao and Gregory J. Pottie, "Interference Strength Alignment and Uplink Channel Allocation in Linear Cellular Networks," Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), pp.1-5, 5-9 June, 2011. pdf
• Yue Zhao and Gregory J. Pottie, "Optimization of power and channel allocation using the deterministic channel model," Information Theory and Applications Workshop (ITA), pp.1-5, Feb., 2010. pdf
• Yue Zhao and Gregory J. Pottie, "Optimal spectrum management in multiuser interference channels," Proc. of IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), pp.2266-2270, June 28 – July 3, 2009. pdf
• Yue Zhao and Gregory J. Pottie, "Optimal spectrum management in two-user symmetric interference channels," Information Theory and Applications Workshop (ITA), pp.256-263, Feb., 2009. pdf

• EE230B, Digital Communication Systems, (Graduate level,)
  Winter 2008, Spring 2008, Spring 2010,


• EE131A, Probability,
  Fall 2008, Winter 2009,


• EE103, Applied Numerical Computing,
  Spring 2009.

• Member of the Technical Program Committee
  IEEE SmartGridComm 2013


• Reviewer
  IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, EURASIP (European Association for Signal Processing) Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, IEEE Communications Letters, IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom), IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM)

Department of Electrical Engineering
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ, 08540

yuez at princeton dot edu